Tv's Racial Divide Reflects The Real World

WASHINGTON — A highly successful black advertising executive once took me aside to offer a bit of advice. Don't even bother trying to reach across to the mainstream, he said.

By "mainstream" he meant white people.

With millions of African-Americans spending billions of dollars every year, he said, there was a huge economic pie in black America alone just waiting for savvy people like him and me to grab a piece of it.

He had a point. It was the early 1980s. Some new, big and exciting black media enterprises like BET (Black Entertainment Television) and Spike Lee's Forty Acres and a Mule Productions were just getting started. More were on the way.

I thanked him for his advice, but declined to take it. I preferred the advice of my grandmother back in the 1960s. The walls of racial segregation in this country were tumbling down. There is a big world opening up to you, she said. Don't deny yourself any of it.

But the ad exec's words came back to me when the latest Nielsen Media Research ratings for network television came out. As a Page 1 New York Times headline put it, "A racial divide widens on network TV."

The trend toward greater integration of actors and audiences typified by "Good Times" in the 1970s and "The Cosby Show" in the 1980s seems to have reversed, the ratings show. In recent years, few or none of the Top 10 most-popular shows in white households can be found on the Top 10 lists among blacks or vice versa, and the gap appears to be widening.

Last year, for example, "Seinfeld," the top-rated show among whites, ranked 50th in black homes, while "Between Brothers," the No. 1 comedy among blacks, ranked 112th among whites.

This season, "Friends," the No. 1 comedy and No. 2 show overall in white homes, ranked 91st for blacks, while "The Steve Harvey Show," a comedy, ranked No. 1 among blacks and 118th among whites.

The result of this divide may be a hardening of the cultural walls that divide our society into little subcultures after years of programming that, for better or worse, encouraged a common culture.

This is especially true when you include the new choices offered by cable channels. When I was a child in the 1950s and early 1960s, black faces were so rare on television that the appearance of a black contestant on "The $64,000 Question," for example, instantly became a neighborhood event. Nowadays, cable offers entire channels of ethnic programming for various races and groups.

As my ad exec friend suggested, there is money to be made in racial "narrowcasting," and not just by minorities. The Fox network built ratings fast in its early days by targeting black viewers with excellent black-oriented comedies like "In Living Color," "Roc," and "Living Single." As Fox's ratings became more competitive with ABC, CBS and NBC, it reduced the black-oriented shows in its lineup.

Now it is the newer networks, WB and UPN, that offer the most black-oriented shows. Three of the top five programs viewed by blacks are comedies on WB , while all of the top five programs most watched by whites, four of which are comedies, are on NBC.

Significantly, the racial viewing gap widens most for comedies. The drama "E.R.," for example, is No. 1 among whites and only No. 15 among blacks. Similarly, "Monday Night Football" on ABC is No. 3 among blacks and No. 7 among whites, a gap that is far narrower than between male and female football viewers.

With that, we see it is not just the races that are dividing from each other in their viewing habits. It is everybody. It is not just similar skin colors that attract viewers. It is cultural tastes. Race and ethnicity may be merely a marker for larger cultural divisions which Americans have become remarkably comfortable.

"Maybe we, as a society, are as integrated as we want to be," a black neighbor of mine, who has a white wife and two biracial sons, remarked at a Brookings Institution panel on the resegregation of American society.

Maybe we are. I have often said that Americans are less of a melting pot than a mulligan stew these days. The cultures in the pot each lend flavor to the whole and absorb some flavor, but they do not completely melt. The big question, then, is how do you prevent the pot from boiling over.

The best way to turn down the heat is by cooling our cultural anxieties. Instead of pulling back into our cultural enclaves, we should take full advantage of opportunities to learn more about other cultures. For all of its flaws, and they are many, TV does offer us a big world of such opportunities. Like grandma said, the door is open. We should not deny ourselves.